


Copper Sound

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, wishing wells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 22:39:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6212959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He liked to watch the people who treated the fountain like a wishing well.</p><p>He liked the way the constant circulation of the water turned the glitter of the coins into a mirage, and he liked to watch the different ways people contributed.</p><p>The idle coin toss.</p><p>The careful drop.</p><p>The whispered prayer and flick.</p><p>The slide across the granite to the edge.</p><p>The handful of change released all at once.</p><p>And then there was the one who leaned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Copper Sound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TaneKore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaneKore/gifts), [bfketh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bfketh/gifts), [inkshaming](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkshaming/gifts), [synstruck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synstruck/gifts), [m00n_un1t_luna (shulkie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shulkie/gifts), [mongoose_bite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mongoose_bite/gifts), [cinnamon_skull](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinnamon_skull/gifts), [Monsoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monsoon/gifts).



> So I wrote this for the someone in the Skype chat I'm part of but it's been long enough to that I can't remember who.
> 
> But yeah. Here it is: sort of a wishing well AU. Kinda. If you squint. Well, there's a wishing well involved. Sort of.

Some people liked to watch.

Some people liked to watch other people.

Some people liked to watch other people watching them.

Levi only liked to watch when he couldn’t quite see the details.

When the streetlights came on and the hallways and elevators of his apartment building went quiet, he liked to watch the windows of the building across the parking lot.

He liked to watch the light from people’s televisions filter through their curtains, liked how all sense of the content was lost by the time it reached him. Liked the flickering, mutating, changing of the colours. The meaningless reds, greens, blues, yellows, purples.

He liked to see people’s silhouettes passing by their windows- hazy, shadowed strangers haloed by yellow incandescence or blue fluorescence, liked to think them too far away to be anything but shadow puppets.

He liked to watch, but he didn’t like to meet looks, didn’t like to be looked at in return, so he walked briskly, with his head down and his eyes open.

He liked to watch distant airplanes cut hazy white lines in the mirror-blue surfaces of puddles.

He liked to listen to conversations in languages he didn’t understand and watch people hurrying through the gauze of heavy rain from the shelter of the bus stop.

From beside the electronics store on the second floor of the mall, he could see the whole of the second floor and, past and below the railings that marked the floor ending, a good deal of the tiled expanse of the first. The lounge. The fountain. He watched. They paid him to. It was rare that something happened.

Nothing more than a rowdy group of teenagers to warn here, a suburbanite determined to get that refund to escort out there.

He liked to watch the people who treated the fountain like a wishing well.

He liked the way the constant circulation of the water turned the glitter of the coins into a mirage, and he liked to watch the different ways people contributed.

The idle coin toss.

The careful drop.

The whispered prayer and flick.

The slide across the granite to the edge.

The handful of change released all at once.

And then there was the one who leaned.

Levi knew he had a friend who worked on the first floor of the mall- he’d seen them walking together, vaguely recognized the green apron, the lanyard. He knew that was why he was around so much.

But it didn’t matter.

What mattered was the way, sometimes, when the mall had gone quiet in the evening, he crouched down beside the fountain, laying his elbows on the edge of the basin, and leaned his head close over the water, dropping coin after coin into the water.

The first time he’d done it, Levi had found it funny.

The second time, he’d found it interesting.

By the third, he found it fascinating.

There was something about that figure, squatting low, spreading the knees of those long legs wide for balance (and pulling his jeans down at the back, below the band of his underwear), olive-brown forearms bare on the granite- sometimes to the elbow (when the hoodie was on), sometimes to the shoulder (when it was not)- dark fingers pinching coins out of an opposite palm, darker hair falling forward (but he could never tell if the ends of it were touching the water).

There was something about that figure.

He didn’t like to watch people who could be seen and remembered.

But there was something about that figure he liked to watch. 

He wondered why he dropped the coins like that.

He wondered what he was wishing for.

He wondered.

***

Despite being a security guard, there really wasn’t much for him to secure.

The monotony of his job was so profound that he’d been known to sometimes lose track of the day of the week. Once, he’d actually come in on his day off.

He’d worked for two hours before anyone had realized. Like him, they were all much too used to seeing him there.

The second-floor day guard had initially assumed _she_ was the one who’d made the mistake.

Today, however, he was working, and had been since nine that morning. It was a Friday.

His weekend plans consisted of helping a friend repair and repaint the damage done to the inside of their garage before their partner returned from his business trip and discovered their predilection for conducting dangerous experiments when left alone.

He was not entirely sure why they continued to bother concealing this fact, rather than getting the inevitable out of the way sooner, but nonetheless, he was prepared to scrub the char from a concrete floor on Saturday before settling in to watch his usual: nature documentaries, which, while interesting and even mildly educational, were ultimately useless to him in his day-to-day life.

He especially liked ones about the depths of the ocean.

At seven minutes to nine, he made his round of the second floor bathrooms, ensuring they were empty of occupants before locking them. At two minutes to nine, he finished his circuit of the stores, having ensured each was closing its gate on schedule, and circled back to his preferred station.

And at two minutes to nine, he was interrupted.

“Hi,” someone said.

“Can I help you?” It was automatic. He didn’t even look up from his checklist. A moment later, he realized he’d probably sounded rude. He still didn’t look up from his checklist.

“Not really, no,” they said. They sounded like they were smiling. Maybe he hadn’t sounded as rude as he’d thought.

He waited for them to either continue or leave.

When they didn’t, he finally looked up, perplexed.

“Oh,” he said. Upon reflection, this was indisputably an odd thing to say to a stranger.

Upon further reflection, it really wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t anticipated who was speaking to him.

After all, he’d only seen and never _heard_ him.

“Hi,” the one who leaned repeated.

“…Hi,” Levi responded, feeling a little emotionally winded.

He could see himself reflected dimly in the relaxed pupils of those unexpectedly vibrant eyes.

“I see you here a lot,” the one who leaned elaborated.

“I work here,” Levi told him helpfully, and then thought, _ah._ This was going to go poorly. He made himself comfortable with that knowledge.

The one who leaned laughed when he was supposed to have adopted a faltering smile and look of dawning worry, apparently having missed the memo about how conversations with Levi went.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, grinning with half his teeth (his left incisor was slightly crooked and it did something to his already crooked smile that made Levi nervous for reasons he couldn’t quite explain). “Yeah, I mean-” He stopped, laughed again. “Well, I fucked that one up, didn’t I?”

Levi barely caught himself in time. The warning about swearing was bubbling off his tongue and into his lips when he bit it back.

The quiet emptiness of the mall suddenly seemed deafeningly apparent.

“Aren’t you here for your friend?” he blurted, and then closed his eyes, marveling at how much like an accusation it sounded.

“Inventory,” was the response. Levi could almost hear his shrug- could hear it, even, in the rustle of cloth over his shoulders. “I didn’t realize he’d be staying late tonight. I thought I’d come say hi.”

“Oh. Hi,” Levi acknowledged again.

A brilliant grin. “Hi. I’m Eren. Nice to meet you, Levi.”

He didn’t even have to say anything- his look of puzzlement was apparently enough.

“You’re wearing a nametag,” Eren pointed out, clearly trying not to smile.

“Oh.”

He’d forgotten.

***

He had no doubt Eren and Hanji would get along famously.

Or infamously.

He couldn’t quite figure out how it was that Eren had managed to invite himself along, but nonetheless, he had no doubt he and Hanji would make a formidable pair.

He was not wrong.

“Levi!” Hanji called out as he entered the garage, characteristically cheerful despite the char smudging their knees- and everything else in their immediate vicinity.

He waited for it, and was not disappointed.

He watched them notice Levi was not alone, watched them raise a gloved hand in greeting, watched them pause as they _saw_ Eren.

“Oh, hello!” they acknowledged, seeming, for the most part, reasonably normal. “Levi, who’s your friend?”

“I’m Eren,” Eren supplied. Levi scowled at the char on the wooden beams above Hanji’s head, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work as they traded civilities.

***

It took Hanji less than ten minutes to arrange a circumstance in which they could speak to Levi alone.

“Levi,” they hissed, grabbing his ladder with both hands, eyes bright and wild behind their glasses, “what the hell is _that_ and where did you get him?”

Levi frowned down at them.  “That’s Eren. He comes to the mall sometimes.” He turned back to the char on the beams and then stopped, spreading his arms to steady himself as Hanji gave his ladder an accusatory shake.

“ _Levi,_ ” they repeated, despairing and ferocious all at once, “did you _look?_ Have you _seen?”_

Levi’s frown evolved into an outright scowl. “Yes, I’ve looked at him. I have seen him with my goddamn eyes, Hanji,” he snapped. “He’s a good-looking kid. So what?”

That earned him an incredulous laugh. “ _Levi_ ,” they said again. He found it was beginning to wear on him, the way they kept saying his name. “You’re ‘good-looking’. I can be ‘good-looking’ if I bother to try. Erwin is unusually ‘good-looking’. That,” they enunciated carefully, jabbing a finger at the door to the house, “is not ‘good-looking’.”

For a moment, he didn’t quite understand what they were saying. They could tell. He knew by the way their groan dragged, like he was a small child trying to paint the walls with the contents of his diaper.

“Levi, that? That is way beyond ‘good-looking’,” they told him, “that’s ‘I work part-time as a model and my agent cries tears of blood every night over the fact that I have no interesting in pursuing an international career’,” they continued, voice rising to the pitch particular to one of their rants, “that’s ‘my face is a perfect blend of boy-next-door attractive, averaged-out symmetry and brand-making distinctiveness’.”

He just stared at the edges of the smudge on the beam closest to him and let them rant.

“Levi, that _face_ -”

“Yes, he has a face, Hanji,” he sighed.

“You know how one of the most classic tropes in fashion is to assemble an outfit in monochrome with only one or two boldly-coloured accessories?” they babbled.

He tipped his forward head in resignation, but he supposed it was enough to be taken as a nod.

“That’s what that _face_ is, Levi. All classic appeal and then _statement pieces_. Have you seen those fucking eyes?”

He didn’t need to say or do anything at this point for Hanji to continue.

So he didn’t. He did, however, make himself more comfortable by sitting down on the top step of the ladder and staring through them.

“And then, with his body, it’s just- everything’s in its place,” they hissed urgently. “Everything’s so perfectly proportioned, I can’t- I don’t even know where to start-”

“Then don’t,” he suggested. “Please don’t.”

They were opening their mouth to say something else when someone tried to shove the door to the house free of its damp-swollen frame.

Hanji snapped to silent attention at the sound.

“Oh, thank god,” Levi muttered.

***

“So, Eren, what do you do?” Hanji asked, too casual.

Eren’s smile was friendly but awkward. “Well, I do some roofing for a friend of my dad’s during the summer,” he answered, and then paused. “Oh, and I, uh, do some modeling sometimes, when I’m not too busy with school.”

Levi almost laughed.

Hanji shot him an intense look behind Eren’s back. “Oh? What’re you studying?” Their voice sounded light, interested but not probing. The effect was disconcerting.

“I’m not really sure yet,” he laughed. “I’m just, uh, I’m just in a general bachelor of arts right now. I’m still figuring out what I want to do with my life, I guess.”

Hanji hummed understandingly, but they were still staring at Levi like he needed to repent for his sins.

***

“We should hang out again,” Eren told him, standing soot-smudged at the end of Hanji’s driveway and no less cheerful for it. “This was a lot of fun.”

“I’ll have to tell Hanji to blow up things in their garage more often,” he said stupidly, and then wondered why he’d thought that was a good idea.

Eren just laughed. “Actually, I was kind of hoping it would just be the two of us.”

“Oh,” Levi answered, and then, “oh?”

There was a long moment of silence. Eren's eyes wandered to the houses across the street. His tongue flickered out over his lips.

Levi started looking at him when he stopped looking back.

“Like a friend thing,” he ventured.

“Like a date,” Eren corrected, still looking away.

“Oh,” Levi said again.

“If you don’t want to, it’s-”

“No, it’s- um,” Levi interrupted, and promptly clammed up.

Eren turned to look at him. He examined the grass edging the driveway rather intensely.

He could hear something a little like amusement in Eren’s voice. “What about… next Friday, when you’re off work? How do you like Pho?”

“I hate it, but okay,” he mumbled, and Eren laughed brightly.

This time, he could definitely hear his smile. It sounded embarrassingly wide. “Well, we’ll work on that part,” he grinned. “Friday it is, then. I’ll meet you at the mall?”

Levi mumbled his assent and Eren said he was looking forward to it and Levi felt a little like he’d been hit by a bus.

He only looked up again when Eren was walking away, jogging down the street to the bus stop.

“What the hell have I gotten myself into?” he murmured to no one.

“I don’t know, but if you don’t get yourself into it, I’m going to be very disappointed,” Hanji whispered from behind him.

***

He was dropping coins in the well as he waited.

Picking them up, fingers to palm to fingers to water and gone.

Levi’s shift ended once the mall was emptied of both customers and staff, and with only the lingerie store on his floor still closing out its tills and writing down its profits, the mall was silent and still.

Except for Eren, crouched beside the wishing well.

Levi watched him.

Levi wondered.

***

The burger joint down the street from the mall was quaint in the way most retro burger joints were- it tried for the aesthetic of an era that had died decades ago (died and taken its politics and its invisible barriers and its impossible expectations with it) and the result looked and sounded like an excuse for adults to play pretend.

It was interesting to him- more interesting than any of their cowboy sports bars or the Viking-themed, “mead hall”-styled bar and grill across town. There was a flavour of the genuine in the naugahyde booths and the faded plastic of the giant ice cream cone bisecting the counter, but the jukebox was digital.

The woman running the counter had the narrow, quietly judgemental look of the poodle skirt days to her, but her employees, dressed-to-theme or not, did not. They were young and no one had ever told them to _‘put out or walk’_.

He wondered if she resented them for that.

Levi didn’t realize he’d been watching the goings-on of the restaurant so intently until Eren laughed.

It was quiet enough to know he hadn’t been meant to hear it.

He tensed, forced himself to relax- tried for distracted rather than (unsalvageably weird and a little bit creepy) uninterested.

“Sorry,” he said, because it was expected, “what were you saying?”

Eren looked amused.

“I wasn’t,” he murmured, eyebrows quirk but eyes warm. Levi could only look him in the eye for a moment before he started feeling skittish, before his eyes slid off to scrutinize the laminated menu in front of him.

“Sorry,” he repeated.

He could hear Eren smiling again. “It’s fine.” There was a song playing on the radio behind the counter that he thought he’d heard his uncle sing once (filtered through the wall, when he thought Levi was too roughed-up to be conscious yet; one of the most surreal moments of his life had been realizing that Kenny could carry a tune) but he didn’t know the name of it. “You seemed like you were enjoying yourself.”

Levi looked at him again, a little surprised (and looked away a second later).

“…I am,” he allowed. “I just… I don’t know what to talk about.”

He saw Eren look down at his menu and looked again, studied the arches of his dark eyebrows, the rise of his cheekbones.

“We don’t have to talk about anything,” Eren smiled. “Do you like chili cheese fries?”

He didn’t know.

***

He hadn’t really planned to stay out late.

It’d just happened.

Dark parking lots reminded him of being fifteen and clenching his fist closed with keys between his fingers, of listening for footsteps as he made his way through the parking garage from the bus stop to the elevator (and it always took so long to come that he began to hear shoes falling on the asphalt in the rhythmic pounding of his own heartbeat).

A dark park was something new.

He’d been during the day, had taken breaks and eaten lunches on the grass on sunny days, just like the rest of them (and only because they’d suggested it, at first).

There hadn’t been much green in the city centre. What little there had been had been home and haven to a scattered number of junkies and homeless during the nights, so he’d never been.

Out here, where the malls closed early and the police kept their closest eye on anyone selling the cheap beer and cigarettes that always seemed to fall into the hands of local teenagers, the park was different at night.

It wasn’t quite dark (or dense) enough to accommodate an outdoor tryst between lovers, or quite big (or dense) enough to safely house a circle of truants sipping (and coughing) bottom-shelf vodka and smoking weed. The streetlights cut prison bars into it between the too-even trees.

One of them was lighting up a third of Eren’s face along with the bench he sat on. He looked like an art piece.

Levi was fascinated by the realization that he always had, in a way- bent over by the fountain, rolling fresh paint on the wall of Hanji’s garage.

“Why do you do it?” he found himself asking, without knowing why (except that it had been on the tip of his tongue since the first time they spoke; except that it had been rolling around in the roof of his mouth, like air risen to the top of a balloon).

Eren looked at him. He looked understandably perplexed.

“When you throw coins in the fountain,” he elaborated haltingly, “what are you wishing for?”

Eren just stared at him for a moment longer, and then he laughed.

“I’m not,” he answered, looking up at the leaves (or maybe just the light-washed night sky, empty though it was). “I just like to listen. I like the sound.”

“The sound?” he parroted.

“Of-” Eren started, and started again. “There’s a sound coins make when they hit the water. It’s a little different depending on the coin, but... I just like the sound they make when I drop them. I like to listen.”

“Oh,” Levi said, for lack of anything else to say.

“It’s like you, I guess,” he continued, looking down this time. “The security guard on the first floor- I could always hear you through her radio while I was waiting,” he admitted. “And I liked your voice. I like listening to you, too. So, I… yeah.”

“Oh,” Levi said again.

***

Some people liked to watch (but only when they couldn’t quite see).

Some people liked to listen (but only when it was quiet, low and secretive, like a voice through a radio).

There was a strange sort of perfect harmony to the way he watched Eren through the half-dark of a room lit only by the seeping, distant orange light of streetlamps, the way Eren had his eyes half-shut, listening to him as he gasped and murmured nonsense, never asking him to speak up or repeat himself.

It was more dreamlike than erotic, and the feeling didn’t fade when it was done.

Levi watched Eren, watched him keeping custody of his hand, eyes closed, palm pressing Levi’s wrist to his ear.

He could feel his pulse thrumming in the pressure of the embrace, slow and regular, and assumed that was what he was listening to now.

Through the dream of it all, he worried dimly about what to say when he, inevitably, had to say something.

“I like to watch nature documentaries,” he said, because he had never been too adept at preventing non-sequiturs.

Eren’s smile was just as slow, half as regular (crooked, with that crooked tooth). “Yeah? What kind?” he mumbled, his breath ghosting Levi’s arm. “I like ones about…” He was a vague sort of post-coital, even dreamier after the dream was over. “Thermal vents. With the… weird crabs and the… those worm things. Y’know?”

Levi knew.

The water was full of things that weren’t quite meant to be seen, weren’t quite meant to be heard.

The coins were like the cameras sent looking for the crabs, he supposed- above the water, the only thing to hear was the sound of them dropping, and the only thing to see was how they were being dropped.


End file.
